Silly Mistakes

I get very irritated when my 10 yo daughter makes “silly mistakes” in her school tests. You did the harder questions right. You knew the easy one; how then could you goof it up? To which she’ll retort: Everyone makes mistakes. Are you saying you’ve never made any?

 

I was reminded of that as I read Jonathan Rowson’s The Moves that Matter, where he described a chess match from 2006, where top chess program named Deep Fritz played world champion Vladimir Kramnik. Kramnik was playing black, and after 32 moves, this was the position: 

It certainly looks like Kramnik (black) has the upper hand here, as Rowson says:

outside passed pawn, bishop versus knight. Kramnik thus was happy to exchange rooks and so, just a move-and-a-half later, this was the new position:

It looks even better for Kramnik (black) now: the rooks have been exchanged, the bishop is threatening the white pawn, which looks doomed, following which his passed pawn should win the game. And so, Kramnik tries to seal the game by offering to exchange queens, by moving his (black) Queen to e3. Those watching the game were aghast. Kramnik had committed the “blunder of the century”. The computer simply moved its (white) Queen to h7. Checkmate.

 

How could a world champion miss a mate-in-one sequence? Rowson explains:

“During a game, we can never see positions without prejudice, literally without prejudging in some way.”

Kramnik position’s was stronger, the exchange of the rooks was to his benefit. He probably got “caught up in his own exquisite narrative” that he couldn’t imagine the immediate fatal threat to himself. And so he missed it.

(If you want to see/play the entire game for yourself, go here. Or you could jump to the end via the “>>” button and move back one move at a time).

 

And therein lies a key difference between computers and humans:

“While computers would make imperceptible errors that you have to work very hard to exploit, they no longer made huge blunders.”

Whereas humans, even world champions, make silly mistakes. I hope my daughter never reads this…

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